Unruly Waters

by Sunil Amrith

  22. Gilmartin, Blood and Water, 175–176.

  23. Thomas Gottschang and Diana Lary, Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

  24. John F. Richards, Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  25. Hung Chung Chang, “Crop Production in China, with Special Reference to Production in Manchuria” (Master of Science thesis, University of Michigan Agricultural College, 1922).

  26. Indu Agnihotri, “Ecology, Land Use, and Colonisation: The Canal Colonies of Punjab,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 33 (1996): 37–58.

  27. Petition from Sakharam Balaji, undated (ca. 1903), MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 124, “Petitions” (1899–1903).

  28. “The humble memorial of the inhabitants of the within mentioned villages in the Belgaum Taluka, of the Belgaum District,” [undated, 1903], MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 124, “Petitions” (1899–1903).

  29. J. Sion, Asie Des Moussons, book 9 of the Géographie Universelle, ed. P. Vidal De La Blanche (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1928), 2:363.

  30. Matthew Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity and the Urban Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 114–119; Ira Klein, “Urban Development and Death: Bombay City, 1870–1914,” Modern Asian Studies 20 (1986): 725–754; Hector Tulloch, The Water Supply of Bombay (Roorkee: Thomason College Press, 1873).

  31. Indian Industrial Commission, Report (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1918).

  32. Indian Industrial Commission, Report, 57–62.

  33. M. Visvesvaraya, Memoirs of My Working Life [1951] (New Delhi: Government of India Publications Division, 1960), 9.

  34. M. Visvesvaraya, Reconstructing India (London: P.S. King & Son, 1920), 127.

  35. Visvesvaraya, Memoirs, 115–124.

  36. S. Muthiah, “Madras Miscellany,” The Hindu, November 24, 2014.

  37. Extract from an Official Note of 1899 on the Desirability of Developing the Agricultural Department, Madras Fisheries Bureau, Bulletin No. 1; F. A. Nicholson, “The Marine Fisheries of the Madras Presidency,” paper read at Lahore Industrial Conference, 1909: contained in BL, IOR, V/25/550/3.

  38. F. A. Nicholson, Note on Fisheries in Japan (Madras: Government Press, 1907).

  39. James Hornell, A Statistical Analysis of the Fishing Industry of Tuticorin, Madras Fisheries Bulletin vol. 11, report no. 3 (Madras: Government Press, 1917). For another perspective, see the insightful discussion of Nicholson and Hornell in Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 107–124.

  40. Edward Buck, “Report on the Control and Utilization of Rivers and Draignage for the Fertilization of the Land and Mitigation of Malaria” (1907), MSA, PWD: Irrigation, v. 267 (1904–1909).

  41. Christopher J. Baker, An Indian Rural Economy: The Tamilnad Countryside, 1880–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal Since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); the “tide of indebtedness” was a phrase used by a colonial official in Dhaka, quoted by Bose; Haruka Yanagisawa, A Century of Change: Caste and Irrigated Lands in Tamilnadu, 1860s–1970s (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996). On low yields in rain-fed agriculture, see Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy, eds., A New Economic History of Colonial India (New York: Routledge, 2016), 100–116.

  42. Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, Abridged Report (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1928), 5.

  43. Report of the United Provinces Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, 1929–30 (Allahabad: Government Press, 1930), 2:119, 234.

  44. Report of the United Provinces Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, 1929–30 (Allahabad: Government Press, 1930), 3:137.

  45. Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, Evidence Taken in the Bombay Presidency, vol. 2, part 1 (London: Stationery Office, 1927), 342.

  46. J. S. Chakravarti, “Agricultural Insurance,” Agricultural Journal of India 12 (1917): 436–441, quotations on pp. 436–437; J. S. Chakravarti, Agricultural Insurance: A Practical Scheme Suited to Indian Conditions (Bangalore: Government Press of Mysore, 1920). The comment on Chakravarti’s prescience is from P. K. Mishra, “Is Rainfall Insurance a New Idea? Pioneering Work Revisited,” Economic and Political Weekly 30 (1995): A84–A88.

  47. Indian Industrial Commission, Report, 4.

  48. P. A. Sheppard, revised by Isabel Falconer, “Walker, Gilbert Thomas,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36692.

  49. G. I. Taylor, “Gilbert Thomas Walker, 1868–1958,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 (1962): 166–174.

  50. D. R. Sikka, “The Role of the India Meteorological Department, 1875–1947,” in Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, c.1784–1947, ed. Uma Das Gupta (New Delhi: Pearson, 2010), chapter 14.

  51. Gilbert T. Walker, “The Meteorology of India,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 73 (July 1925): 838–855, quotation on p. 839.

  52. Gilbert T. Walker, “Correlation in Seasonal Variations of Weather, VIII. A Preliminary Study of World-Weather,” Memoirs of the Indian Meteorological Department 24, part 4 (1923): 75–131, quotation on p. 75.

  53. Michael Bardecki, “Walker Circulation,” in Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change, ed. S. George Philander, 2nd ed. (New York: Sage, 2005), 1:1073.

  54. Gilbert T. Walker, “On the Meteorological Evidence for Supposed Changes of Climate in India,” Indian Meteorological Memoirs 21, part 1 (1910): 1–21.

  55. Gilbert T. Walker, “Correlation in Seasonal Variations of Weather, II,” Indian Meteorological Memoirs 21, part 2 (1910): 21–45, quoted in J. M. Walker, “Pen Portraits of Past Presidents—Sir Gilbert Walker, CSI, ScD, MA, FRS,” Weather 52 (1997): 217–220, quotation on p. 219.

  56. Richard W. Katz, “Sir Gilbert Walker and a Connection Between El Niño and Statistics,” Statistical Science 17 (2002): 97–112.

  57. Walker, “Correlation, VIII” (1923), 109.

  58. Walker, “Meteorology of India,” 843.

  59. Gilbert T. Walker, “Correlation in the Seasonal Variations of Weather,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 44 (1918): 223–234; Gilbert T. Walker, “The Atlantic Ocean,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 53 (1927): 71–113, quotations on p. 113.

  60. Priya Satia, “Developing Iraq: Britain, India and the Redemption of Technology in the First World War,” Past and Present 197 (2007): 211–255.

  61. Walker, “Meteorology of India,” 849.

  62. Taylor, “Gilbert Thomas Walker,” 171.

  63. Gilbert T. Walker, Review of Climate Through the Ages: A Study of Climatic Factors and Climatic Variations by C.W.P. Brooks, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 53 (1927): 321–323.

  64. Gilbert T. Walker, “On Monsoon Forecasting in India,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 19 (1938): 297–299.

  65. Charles Normand, “Monsoon Seasonal Forecasting,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 79 (1953): 463–73, quotations on p. 469.

  66. Walker, “Meteorology of India,” 838–855, quotation on p. 848.

  67. Sikka, “India Meteorological Department”; the quotations from Walker and Field draw on their papers deposited in the office of the director-general of meteorology in India, which were not available for consultation by researchers.

  68. Calvino, Invisible Cities, 17.

  CHAPTER SIX: WATER AND FREEDOM

  1. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131.

  2. Jawaharlal Nehru to B. J. K. Hallowes (Deputy Commissioner, Allahabad, and President of the Famine Relief Fund of Gonda), June 26, 1929, in The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, ed. S. Gopal and Uma Iyengar (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12.

>   3. Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Basis of Society,” Presidential Address to Bombay Youth Congress, Poona, December 12, 1928, in Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1:8–10.

  4. Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1922).

  5. Sun Yat-sen, “Third Principle of the People: People’s Livelihood,” cited in Deirdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 117.

  6. David A. Pietz, The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), chapter 3; quotations on pp. 93–94.

  7. This account of the Mahad protest draws on Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (London: Hurst and Company, 2005), 47–48.

  8. Sudipta Kaviraj, “Ideas of Freedom in Modern India,” in The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa, ed. Robert H. Taylor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 120–121.

  9. M. K. Gandhi, “Salt Tax,” Young India, February 27, 1930, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Government of India Publications Division, 1970), 48:499–500.

  10. Robert Carter and Erin McCarthy, “Watsuji Tetsurô,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2014 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/watsuji-tetsuro/.

  11. Watsuji Tetsuro, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas (Tokyo: Ministry of Education, 1961), 18–20.

  12. Watsuji, Climate, 25–26.

  13. Watsuji, Climate, 22–23, 38.

  14. Watsuji, Climate, 39.

  15. Mukerjee makes an appearance in, among others: C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

  16. Radhakamal Mukerjee, “Social Ecology of a River Valley,” Sociology and Social Research 12 (1927): 341–347, quotations on p. 342; Radhakamal Mukerjee, Regional Sociology (New York and London: Century and Co., 1926); Radhakamal Mukerjee, The Changing Face of Bengal: A Study in Riverine Economy (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1938).

  17. Léon Metchnikoff, La Civilisation et Les Grands Fleuves Historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1889); Mukerjee, “Social Ecology,” quotation on 342; William Willcocks, Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and its Application to Modern Problems (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1930).

  18. Mukerjee, “Social Ecology,” 345–347.

  19. C. J. Baker, “Economic Reorganization and the Slump in South and Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 325–349.

  20. I explore these migrations in detail in Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), especially chapters 4 and 5.

  21. Confidential letter from the Agent of the Government of India in British Malaya to the Government of India, April 3, 1933: NAI, Department of Education, Health and Lands: Overseas, file no. 206-2/32—L&O.

  22. J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 428.

  23. “World’s Largest Dam Opened,” The Statesman, August 22, 1934.

  24. Handwritten memo by “SA,” April 30, 1938, appended to the file of correspondence following the Chief Engineer’s “Note on the Beneficial Effects of the Stanley Reservoir to Cauvery Delta Irrigation,” Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai, Government Order 547-I, 27/2/1936.

  25. Handwritten note in Government of Madras Public Works Department, Government Order number 375, February 24, 1938. Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai [TNSA].

  26. Pietz, Yellow River, chapter 3.

  27. National Planning Committee No. 2: Being an Abstract of the Proceedings and other Particulars Relating to the National Planning Committee (Bombay: K.T. Shah, 1940), 43.

  28. “Burma-China Frontier: Chinese Claim to the Irrawaddy Triangle” (1933), BL, IOR, L/P&S/12/2231, enclosing William Credner’s article in Eastern Miscellany (Shanghai), January 10, 1931; P. M. R. Leonard and V. G. Robert, Report on the Fourth Expedition to the “Triangle” for the Liberation of Slaves (Rangoon: Government Printing, 1930), quotation in text from notes in archival file.

  29. Madras Fisheries Bulletin, 1918–1937 (Madras: Government Printing, 1938), 2; see Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 120–124.

  30. Micah Muscolino, “Yellow River Flood, 1938–47,” DisasterHistory.org, accessed March 3, 2018, www.disasterhistory.org/yellow-river-flood-1938-47; Micah S. Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  31. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–45 (London: Allen Lane, 2004).

  32. Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–45 (London: Allen Lane, 2016).

  33. India Meteorological Department, Hundred Years of Weather Service (1875–1975), bound typescript in the library of the Regional Meteorological Centre, Chennai, consulted in February 2015.

  34. Sunil S. Amrith, “Food and Welfare in India, c. 1900–1950,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (2008): 1010–1035; the quotation from Nehru is in a letter to B. J. K. Hallowes, June 26, 1929, see note 2 above.

  35. The Ramakrishna Mission: Bengal and Orissa Cyclone Relief, 1942–44 (Howrah: Ramakrishna Mission, 1944), 1–2.

  36. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 282–291.

  37. Note to Famine Commission (1944): Papers of L. G. Pinnell, British Library, Asian and African Studies Collection, European Manuscripts: MSS Eur D 911/7.

  38. On ecological decline, see Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State, and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2010), chapter 8. On famine, see Sugata Bose, “Starvation Amidst Plenty: The Making of Famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin, 1942–45,” Modern Asian Studies 24, no. 4 (1990): 699–727; Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–4 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 282–291.

  39. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India [1946] (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 496–498; S. G. Sardesai, Food in the United Provinces (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1944), 19, 36–37.

  40. V. D. Wickizer and M. K. Bennett, The Rice Economy of Monsoon Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1941), 1, 189.

  41. Nehru, Discovery of India, 535; Gyan Chand, Problem of Population (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 10.

  42. File note on Bhakra Dam Project, February 23, 1945, NAI, Political Department, I A Branch: file no. 21(22)—IA/45.

  43. File note by T.A.W. Foy, October 31, 1946, NAI, 21(22)—IA/45.

  44. Meghnad Saha, editorial, Science and Culture 1 (1935): 3–4.

  45. Meghnad Saha, “Flood,” Science and Culture 9 (September 1943): 95–97.

  46. Meghnad Saha and Kamalesh Ray, “Planning for the Damodar Valley” (originally published in Science and Culture, 10 [1944]), in Collected Works of Meghnad Saha, ed. Santimay Chatterjee (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1987), 2:115–144, quotations on pp. 116, 132, 135.

  47. Saha and Ray, “Planning for the Damodar Valley,” 132, 135.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: RIVERS DIVIDED, RIVERS DAMMED

  1. The best narrative account of the period is in Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007); on the early Cold War in Asia, see Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), chapter 5.

  2. For a concise overview, see Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2007).

  3. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); for a moving set of testimonies, see Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Hurst, 2000).

  4. David Gilmartin, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 206.

  5. Government of India, Press Information Bureau, “Facts about Canal Dispute”—enclosure in a letter from S. V. Sampath to all Indian Missions abroad, September 27, 1949: National Archives of India [hereafter NAI], Ministry of External Affairs [hereafter MEA], File 6/1/7-XP (P)/49.

  6. Joya Chatterji, “The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947–52,” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 185–242.

  7. Rammanohar Lohia, The Guilty Men of India’s Partition (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1960).

  8. Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work Across the India-Pakistan Divide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  9. Saadat Hasan Manto, “Yazid,” in Naked Voices: Stories and Sketches, trans. Rakhshanda Jalil (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2008), 106.

  10. India Meteorological Department, Hundred Years of Weather Service (1875–1975), bound typescript in the library of the Regional Meteorological Centre, Chennai, consulted in February 2015, p. 55.

  11. C. N. Vakil, Economic Consequences of the Partition, 2nd ed. (Bombay: National Information and Publications, 1949), 3–4.

  12. Gilmartin, Blood and Water, 206.

  13. Daniel Haines, Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chapter 3.

  14. Cited in Haines, Rivers Divided, 51.

  15. India, Ministry of External Affairs, Directive on Canal Water Dispute Between India and Pakistan, NAI, MEA, File 6/1/7-XP (P)/49.